AFP, published Monday 30 January 2023 at 01:38
New York in winter conjures up traditional images of Central Park and Times Square draped in a blanket of white. But not this year.
Not a single snowflake fell on Sunday as the metropolis broke a 50-year record for the first snowfall of the winter season.
It’s also on track to record its highest number of consecutive snowflake-free days.
An unusual situation that disturbs local residents whose love-hate relationship with snow is already very complicated.
“It’s really sad,” Anne Hansen, a retired teacher, told AFP. “We don’t usually like to see the snow coming. But now we’re starting to regret it bitterly.”
In the metropolis nicknamed “The Big Apple”, the first snowfall falls on average in mid-December. Last year it lasted until Christmas Eve.
Pupils and employees then appreciate the often generously endowed “snow days” that enable them to stay at home. The kids get out their sleds and the adults strap on their cross-country skis and head towards Central Park.
“We stay at home, we drink hot chocolate, the dog loves it,” director Renata Romain told AFP.
But, he is quick to add, “the snow is nice to look at the first day, but after that it gets dirty, melts and is dirty”.
Meteorologists count snow as deep as 0.1 inch (a quarter centimeter) in Central Park. A few isolated flakes are not enough.
In 1973, New Yorkers waited until January 29 for snow, according to the National Weather Service (NWS).
The absence of snow on Sunday means that this duration was exceeded for the first time since records began in 1869.
New York is also approaching its longest streak of consecutive days without snow: the record to be beaten is 332 days. On Sunday the number of 326 days was reached.
“It’s very unusual,” Nelson Vaz, a meteorologist, confirms to AFP, recalling the recent paradoxical cold spells. A foot of snow fell in Buffalo in December, killing 39 people.
But in New York, 600 kilometers to the south, this historic storm that froze much of the United States around Christmas brought heavy rain and unusually high temperatures.
According to Weather.com, you have to go back to 1932 to find a warmer start to January than this year.